Confirmation Bias and the Open Access Advantage: Some Methodological Suggestions for the Davis Citation Study

: Davis (2008) analyzes citations from 2004-2007 in 11 biomedical journals. For 1,600 of the 11,000 articles (15%), their authors paid the publisher to make them Open Access (OA). The outcome, confirming previous studies (on both paid and unpaid OA), is a significant OA citation Advantage, but a small one (21%, 4% of it correlated with other article variables such as number of authors, references and pages). The author infers that the size of the OA advantage in this biomedical sample has been shrinking annually from 2004-2007, but the data suggest the opposite. In order to draw valid conclusions from these data, the following five further analyses are necessary: (1) The current analysis is based only on author-choice (paid) OA. Free OA self-archiving needs to be taken into account too, for the same journals and years, rather than being counted as non-OA, as in the current analysis. (2) The proportion of OA articles per journal per year needs to be reported and taken into account. (3) Estimates of journal and article quality and citability in the form of the Journal Impact Factor and the relation between the size of the OA Advantage and journal as well as article “citation-bracket” need to be taken into account. (4) The sample-size for the highest-impact, largest-sample journal analyzed, PNAS, is restricted and is excluded from some of the analyses. An analysis of the full PNAS dataset is needed, for the entire 2004-2007 period. (5) The analysis of the interaction between OA and time, 2004-2007, is based on retrospective data from a June 2008 total cumulative citation count. The analysis needs to be redone taking into account the dates of both the cited articles and the citing articles, otherwise article-age effects and any other real-time effects from 2004-2008 are confounded. Davis proposes that an author self-selection bias for providing OA to higher-quality articles (the Quality Bias, QB) is the primary cause of the observed OA Advantage, but this study does not test or show anything at all about the causal role of QB (or of any of the other potential causal factors, such as Accessibility Advantage, AA, Competitive Advantage, CA, Download Advantage, DA, Early Advantage, EA, and Quality Advantage, QA). The author also suggests that paid OA is not worth the cost, per extra citation. This is probably true, but with OA self-archiving, both the OA and the extra citations are free

Open Access Scientometrics and the UK Research Assessment Exercise

Scientometric predictors of research performance need to be validated by showing that they have a high correlation with the external criterion they are trying to predict. The UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) -- together with the growing movement toward making the full-texts of research articles freely available on the web -- offer a unique opportunity to test and validate a wealth of old and new scientometric predictors, through multiple regression analysis: Publications, journal impact factors, citations, co-citations, citation chronometrics (age, growth, latency to peak, decay rate), hub/authority scores, h-index, prior funding, student counts, co-authorship scores, endogamy/exogamy, textual proximity, download/co-downloads and their chronometrics, etc. can all be tested and validated jointly, discipline by discipline, against their RAE panel rankings in the forthcoming parallel panel-based and metric RAE in 2008. The weights of each predictor can be calibrated to maximize the joint correlation with the rankings. Open Access Scientometrics will provide powerful new means of navigating, evaluating, predicting and analyzing the growing Open Access database, as well as powerful incentives for making it grow faster

Open access self-archiving: An author study

This, our second author international, cross-disciplinary study on open access had 1296 respondents. Its focus was on self-archiving. Almost half (49%) of the respondent population have self-archived at least one article during the last three years. Use of institutional repositories for this purpose has doubled and usage has increased by almost 60% for subject-based repositories. Self-archiving activity is greatest amongst those who publish the largest number of papers. There is still a substantial proportion of authors unaware of the possibility of providing open access to their work by self-archiving. Of the authors who have not yet self-archived any articles, 71% remain unaware of the option. With 49% of the author population having self-archived in some way, this means that 36% of the total author population (71% of the remaining 51%), has not yet been appraised of this way of providing open access. Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because of the perceived time required and possible technical difficulties in carrying out this activity, yet findings here show that only 20% of authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of depositing an article in a repository, and that this dropped to 9% for subsequent deposits. Another author worry is about infringing agreed copyright agreements with publishers, yet only 10% of authors currently know of the SHERPA/RoMEO list of publisher permissions policies with respect to self-archiving, where clear guidance as to what a publisher permits is provided. Where it is not known if permission is required, however, authors are not seeking it and are self-archiving without it. Communicating their results to peers remains the primary reason for scholars publishing their work; in other words, researchers publish to have an impact on their field. The vast majority of authors (81%) would willingly comply with a mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional or subject-based repository. A further 13% would comply reluctantly; 5% would not comply with such a mandate

The Open Research Web: A Preview of the Optimal and the Inevitable

The multiple online research impact metrics we are developing will allow the rich new database , the Research Web, to be navigated, analyzed, mined and evaluated in powerful new ways that were not even conceivable in the paper era – nor even in the online era, until the database and the tools became openly accessible for online use by all: by researchers, research institutions, research funders, teachers, students, and even by the general public that funds the research and for whose benefit it is being conducted: Which research is being used most? By whom? Which research is growing most quickly? In what direction? under whose influence? Which research is showing immediate short-term usefulness, which shows delayed, longer term usefulness, and which has sustained long-lasting impact? Which research and researchers are the most authoritative? Whose research is most using this authoritative research, and whose research is the authoritative research using? Which are the best pointers (“hubs”) to the authoritative research? Is there any way to predict what research will have later citation impact (based on its earlier download impact), so junior researchers can be given resources before their work has had a chance to make itself felt through citations? Can research trends and directions be predicted from the online database? Can text content be used to find and compare related research, for influence, overlap, direction? Can a layman, unfamiliar with the specialized content of a field, be guided to the most relevant and important work? These are just a sample of the new online-age questions that the Open Research Web will begin to answer

Usage Bibliometrics

Scholarly usage data provides unique opportunities to address the known shortcomings of citation analysis. However, the collection, processing and analysis of usage data remains an area of active research. This article provides a review of the state-of-the-art in usage-based informetric, i.e. the use of usage data to study the scholarly process.Comment: Publisher's PDF (by permission). Publisher web site: books.infotoday.com/asist/arist44.shtm

Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review

Within the context of the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) research scope, this literature review investigates the current trends, advantages, disadvantages, problems and solutions, opportunities and barriers in Open Access Publishing (OAP), and in particular Open Access (OA) academic publishing. This study is intended to scope and evaluate current theory and practice concerning models for OAP and engage with intellectual, legal and economic perspectives on OAP. It is also aimed at mapping the field of academic publishing in the UK and abroad, drawing specifically upon the experiences of CREATe industry partners as well as other initiatives such as SSRN, open source software, and Creative Commons. As a final critical goal, this scoping study will identify any meaningful gaps in the relevant literature with a view to developing further research questions. The results of this scoping exercise will then be presented to relevant industry and academic partners at a workshop intended to assist in further developing the critical research questions pertinent to OAP

The citation advantage of open-access articles

Four subjects, ecology, applied mathematics, sociology and economics, were selected to assess whether there is a citation advantage between journal articles that have an open access (OA) version on the Internet compared to those articles that are exclusively toll access (TA). Citations were counted using the Web of Science and the OA status of articles was determined by searching OAIster, OpenDOAR, Google and Google Scholar. Of a sample of 4633 articles examined, 2280 (49%) were OA and had a mean citation count of 9.04, whereas the mean for TA articles was 5.76. There appears to be a clear citation advantage for those articles that are OA as opposed to those that are TA. This advantage, however, varies between disciplines, with sociology having the highest citation advantage but the lowest number of OA articles from the sample taken and ecology having the highest individual citation count for OA articles but the smallest citation advantage. Tests of correlation or association between OA status and a number of variables were generally found to be weak or inconsistent. The cause of this citation advantage has not been determined

Confirmation Bias and the Open Access Advantage: Some Methodological Suggestions for the Davis Citation Study

Davis (2008) analyzes citations from 2004-2007 in 11 biomedical journals. 15% of authors paid to make them Open Access (OA). The outcome is a significant OA citation Advantage, but a small one (21%). The author infers that the OA advantage has been shrinking yearly, but the data suggest the opposite. Further analyses are necessary: (1) Not just author-choice (paid) OA but Free OA self-archiving needs to be taken into account rather than being counted as non-OA. (2) proportion of OA articles per journal per year needs to be reported and taken into account. (3) The Journal Impact Factor and the relation between the size of the OA Advantage article 'citation-bracket' need to be taken into account. (4) The sample-size for the highest-impact, largest-sample journal analyzed, PNAS, is restricted and excluded from some of the analyses. The full PNAS dataset is needed. (5) The interaction between OA and time, 2004-2007, is based on retrospective data from a June 2008 total cumulative citation count. The dates of both the cited articles and the citing articles need to be taken into account. The author proposes that author self-selection bias for is the primary cause of the observed OA Advantage, but this study does not test this or of any of the other potential causal factors. The author suggests that paid OA is not worth the cost, per extra citation. But with OA self-archiving both the OA and the extra citations are free.Comment: 17 pages, 17 references, 1 table; comment on 0808.2428v

»(Bez)vrijedni radovi« – jesu li faktor odjeka časopisa i broj citata adekvatni indikatori za evaluaciju kvalitete znanstvenika?

Technology driven changings with consecutive increase in the on-line availability and accessibility of journals and papers rapidly changes patterns of academic communication and publishing. The dissemination of important research findings through the academic and scientific community begins with publication in peer-reviewed journals. Aim of this article is to identify, critically evaluate and integrate the findings of relevant, high-quality individual studies addressing the trends of enhancement of visibility and accessibility of academic publishing in digital era. The number of citations a paper receives is often used as a measure of its impact and by extension, of its quality. Many aberrations of the citation practices have been reported in the attempt to increase impact of someone’s paper through manipulation with self-citation, inter-citation and citation cartels. Authors revenues to legally extend visibility, awareness and accessibility of their research outputs with uprising in citation and amplifying measurable personal scientist impact has strongly been enhanced by on line communication tools like networking (LinkedIn, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Google Scholar), sharing (Facebook, Blogs, Twitter, Google Plus) media sharing (Slide Share), data sharing (Dryad Digital Repository, Mendeley database, PubMed, PubChem), code sharing, impact tracking. Publishing in Open Access journals. Many studies and review articles in last decade have examined whether open access articles receive more citations than equivalent subscription toll access) articles and most of them lead to conclusion that there might be high probability that open access articles have the open access citation advantage over generally equivalent payfor-access articles in many, if not most disciplines. But it is still questionable are those never cited papers indeed “Worth(less) papers” and should journal impact factor and number of citations be considered as only suitable indicators to evaluate quality of scientists? “Publish or perish” phrase usually used to describe the pressure in academia to rapidly and continually publish academic work to sustain or further one’s career can now in 21. Century be reformulate into “Publish, be cited and maybe will not Perish”.Promjene pokretane tehnologijom koje posljedično dovode do uzastopnog povećanja on-line dostupnosti i pristupljivosti časopisima i znanstvenim radovima ubrzano mijenjaju obrasce akademske komunikacije i publiciranja. Širenje važnih otkrića u znanstvenoj zajednici počinje objavljivanjem u recenziranim časopisima. Svrha je ovoga članka prepoznati, kritički procijeniti i integrirati nalaze relevantnih, visokokvalitetnih individualnih studija koje se bave trendovima povećanja vidljivosti i pristupačnosti akademskoga izdavaštva u digitalnom dobu. Rezultati i diskusija: Broj citata koja pojedini znanstveni rad dobiva često se koristi kao mjera njegova utjecaja, a šire shvaćeno i njegove kvalitete. Zabilježene su mnoge aberacije u praksi citiranja kroz pokušaje povećanja utjecaja nečijega znanstvenoga rada manipuliranjem sa samocitiranjem, inter-citiranjem i udruživanjem u »citatne kartele«. Mogući putovi kojima bi autori mogli legalno povećati vidljivost i dostupnost svojih istraživačkih rezultata, s povećanjem broja citata i pojačavanjem mjerljivoga odjeka utjecaja, kako rada tako i znanstvenika, snažno su poboljšani on-line komunikacijskim alatima kao što su umrežavanje (LinkedIn, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Google Scholar), dijeljenje (Slide Share),dijeljenje podataka (Dryad Digital Repository, Mendeley database, PubMed, PubChem), dijeljenje koda, praćenje veličine utjecaja (Facebook, Blogovi, Twitter, Google Plus), te objavljivanjem u časopisima otvorenoga pristupa. Mnogi znanstveni i pregledni radovi u posljednjem desetljeću ispitali su hoće li se radovi objavljeni u časopisima s otvorenim pristupom više citirati u odnosu na radove objavljene u časopisima koji naplaćuju pristup, te većina rezultata upućuje na zaključak da bi mogla postojati komparativna prednost pri citiranju radova objavljenih uz otvoreni pristup u odnosu na drugu skupinu časopisa u mnogim, ako ne i u svim područjima znanosti. Ostaje upitno jesu li radovi koji ne budu nikad citirani doista i »bezvrijedni radovi«, te jesu li su faktor odjeka časopisa i broj citata doista jedini adekvatni indikatori za evaluaciju kvalitete znanstvenika? Zaključak: Frazu »Objavi ili nestani«, koju se obično koristi za opisivanje pritiska na članove akademske zajednice da brzo i neprekidno objavljuje znanstvene radove za održavanje ili napredak u daljnjoj karijeri, u 21. stoljeću se može preoblikovati u »Objavi i budi citiran, da možda ne bi nestao.